For me, this is almost to
have come full circle – though as anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with
the Ring will tell you, the so-called
‘cycle’ does not end where it began, its world having been changed forever.
Though I saw Richard Jones’s Royal Opera Götterdämmerung
at the old house, the only performance I saw before its closure, my first full Ring was at the Royal Albert Hall, with
Royal Opera forces under Bernard Haitink. Travelling down from Cambridge each
day, this sometime impoverished student standing up in the Gallery still
considers it, from the relative comfort of the RAH Stalls, a formative musical
experience of his life. It has certainly never been better conducted in his
experience, nor better sung; and, given the vagaries of stagings, it is
sometimes difficult to avoid the reactionary position that ‘a concert
performance would be preferable’. Of course it is not; but the semi-staged
solution adopted at the Albert Hall both then and now does afford us the great
luxury of being able to concentrate entirely upon the score (words included). Justin Way’s direction was keen, but was
limited, so far as one could tell, to placing of the singers and presumably at
least some advice concerning their stage interaction. If one has any sense, one
takes what one can from different performances and productions, ever aware that
no one performance will ‘have it all’. What I can say, however, is that there
was, with the possible exception of the production, not a single element of
this Proms Rheingold that was not
preferable to Antonio Pappano’s at-best-amateurish attempts at Covent Garden to
act as Haitink’s successor.

There was actually one other
aspect of the Proms experience that lessened appreciation: a heavy-breather
seated behind me. Not once, despite the hardest of stares, did he relent. It
might sound trivial, but, in a drama that requires of its audience total
concentration, it is possible to ignore. How I wish there were some Stasi-style
opportunity to report such selfish behaviour and have the miscreant banished
for future performances. Moreover, the entry of audience members during the
descent to Nibelheim should never havebeen permitted; I assumed at first that a highly conspicuous woman with
shopping bag across the hall, seemingly heading for the stage, denoted a racy realisation
of Mime. Such afforded amusement; others breaking the spell did not. Moreover,
a telephone’s invasion of Nibelheim took the idea of Alberich’s technological
breakthroughs far too literally.

Logistical matters detracted,
but the drama remained the thing. Whereas, across town, Pappano has never proved
able to maintain a Wagnerian line, Daniel Barenboim did so almost effortlessly.
From the opening E-flat to the gods’ entrance into Valhalla, the drama unfolded
as if heard in a single breath. If that sounds like the Fernhören of Barenboim’s idol, Furtwängler, then inspiration
doubtless derives from that source, but the differences are at least as
noteworthy. As I noted with respect to Barenboim’s
Rheingold with similar forces in
Berlin, there is perhaps a surprising degree of ‘objectivity’ that seems,
given the evidence of two separate performances, to have become part and parcel
of his conception. (On the evidence of Berlin, it is a feature only of Rheingold, but we shall see – or rather,
hear.) It is a perfectly justifiable response to the frigid ‘pre-historical’
world of Wagner’s Vorabend, and has
something in common with the readings of Karajan and Boulez. Some, at least, of
the music one hears rather as if there were an aural counterpart to the veil that would, according to Wagner’s
directions, conceal Valhalla until the end. (In Berlin, Barenboim actually
adopted the Bayreuth practice of covering the pit.) There were, moreover, even
within a highly flexible reading as a whole, certain passages that intriguingly
hinted towards the Neue Sachlichkeit
of a composer such as Hindemith; Schoenberg, another Barenboim speciality, can
doubtless wait until following evenings. Barenboim’s reading, in keeping with
the relatively ‘objective’ approach, was often on the swift side, yet anything
but superficial; there was, though, no tendency to linger, just for the sake of
it, Wagner’s textural variegation
offering its own opportunities for æsthetic absorption. The conductor showed
beyond doubt – not that there should ever have been any grounds for such naïve
either/or oppositions – that a fully satisfying musical reading was perfectly
consonant with, indeed dependent upon, dramatic communication of Wagner’s poem:
to take but one instance, Barenboim almost punched the air on the ‘wiss’ Fasolt’s
‘Du Weiser, wiss’ es von ihm’, incitement to an accent that was musico-dramatic
in the fullest sense of the term.

None of that, of course,
could be accomplished without the burnished Staatskapelle Berlin. If this Proms
Ring were to have but one lasting
accomplishment, to have made London audiences once again aware of how Wagner
might sound with the combination of a great orchestra and conductor would be achievement
enough. The Prelude received a realisation – insofar as I could disregard the
sub-Alberich breathing from behind – as close to perfect as anyone might reasonably
hope for: neither Barenboim nor his orchestra offered ‘interventionism’, yet Wagner’s
evolving vision of what his contemporary Marx termed ‘spontaneous generation’
told its own story, even when shorn of scenic realisation. As Wagner’s Dresden
comrade-in-arms, Bakunin put it in his earlier essay, God and the State, we hear ‘the
gradual development of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the
simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher,’ not ‘the vile matter of the idealists … incapable
of producing anything,’ but ‘matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile,
active, productive.’ The words might almost have been intended as a programme
note – though they come a little more than a decade before Wagner’s
composition.

The orchestral contribution
was, a very occasional obscured entry
notwithstanding, truly excellent: not in a quasi-narcissistic fashion, such as
one heard sometimes with the Berlin
Philharmonic’s Ring under Simon Rattle,
but as a proper instantiation of Wagner’s Opera
and Drama ‘Greek chorus’. A splendidly sepulchral Wagner tuba offered the
deftest – a word one does not always necessarily associate with the instrument –
upon Woglinde’s broaching the apparently absurd idea of renouncing love for
gold. And how the brass and timpani let
rip when permitted to do so – for instance, upon the arrival of Fasolt and
Fafner: larger than life in more than one sense. The transformation between the
first scenes, in which the ring motif is dialectically transformed into that
denoting Valhalla, owed a great deal to the timbral sophistication of
middle-range instruments such as that baleful English horn, violas, and of
course the increasingly tender horn. Likewise
the wind ageing of the gods upon Freia’s departure was second to none I have
ever heard, effected with painful, cruel beauty, a telling comment upon Wagner’s
Feuerbachian unmasking of delusions to immortality. (They looked increasingly
frozen of aspect too, for which the director deserves credit.) It was a pity,
then, that the anvils were so underwhelming: almost a case of spoiling the ship
for a ha’p’orth of tar. No matter: the horn-playing as Mime told us of old
Nibelheim was so exquisitely, musically phrased that ‘wonnig Geschmeid’, nielichen
Niblungentand’ came to life before our ears.

Barenboim’s cast was more
than equal to the task , as distinguished a complement to the orchestra as
anyone might reasonably hope for. The Rhinemaidens were near-idea in blend, as
fine a trio as I can recall having heard, Anna Lapkovskaja’s Flosshilde perhaps
especially radiant. Their final lament was as beautifully, heart-rendingly
piercing as I can recall. Iain Paterson made a distinguished debut as Wotan,
perhaps less authoritative than many, but the god of Das Rheingold is a less weighty figure than he will become.
Attention to the text was exemplary throughout. Ekaterina Gubanova once again
shone as Wotan’s consort. The portrayal of Fricka’s tenderness, an intimate
portrait of a wronged, anxious wife, blossomed into splendidly divine
self-assurance where necessary, but this was so much more than a mere harridan.
When she approached Wotan following Erda’s intervention, Gubanova showed just
how expertly she could spin out a line, not for its own sake but for dramatic
effect, Barenboim her encouraging and trusting partner. Stephan Rügamer’s Loge
was a vivid assumption, sardonic yet not caricatured, indeed at times
beautifully sung. The moment of shock upon
Loge’s ‘Durch Raub!’ registered without being milked, testament to the artistry
of both Rügamer and Barenboim. It verged upon a mini-caesura, at the very least
a telling piece of punctuation, punctuation that nevertheless made sense in
terms of the greater whole. (Alberich’s ‘Knecht’, as in his Act IV ‘als des
Ringes Knecht’ curse, offered a telling parallel – and development, followed by
the vilest orchestral fury, properly chilling.)

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s Alberich
was lighter than one generally hears, but he made a virtue of that, drawing our
attention to the intricacies of Wagner’s poem. This Alberich could shade into Sprechgesang, for instance on the ‘Lust’
of ‘doch listig erzwäng’ ich mir Lust?’ The alienating darkness had chilling
dramatic effect, so long as it were not over-employed, which it was not. Especially
notable was the colouring of every word in his Nibelheim threats to his band of
wage-slaves – ‘Zögert ihr noch? Zaudert wohl gar?’ Every word told, yet without
disruption to phrasing. Barenboim’s pointing of rhythms as Alberich poured out
sarcastic scorn upon Loge – ‘Der Listigste dünkt sich Loge; andre denkt er
immer sich dumm...’ – offered an excellent example of the indissoluble union of
singer and conductor, words and music; this was music drama at its finest. Peter
Bronder’s Mime offered a fine evocation of proto-Nietzschean ressentiment, his pitiful anger formed
by his lowly position within the world – Wotan’s, be it noted, as well as
Alberich’s. Eric Halfvarson and Stephen
Milling made much of their roles as giants. Milling’s Fasolt was, quite
rightly, more mellifluous, more sympathetic. Fafner’s insulting ‘Geck’ towards
his lovelorn brother, the word veritably spat out, said it all. Nor of course,
however predictable the assessment may be, should one forget Anna Larsson’s
well-nigh definitive Erda, Mahler’s Urlicht
palpably on the aural horizon. Everything, then, augurs well for Die Walküre this evening – not least the
mendacious orchestral blaze for the gods’ closing Totentanz. A storm awaits.

3 comments:

AndreasvonG
said...

dear Mark, of course I've not been able to listen to the performance, but generally speaking I find Barenboim a rather boring conductor. I have got his Ring dvd, and despite some furtwaenglerish moments, I think it's a good performance very far from either Furtwaengler or even the very theatrical Bohm. Perhaps things have changed, I can't judge. My penny, of course.

I have often fantasised about dealing with selfish behaviour in concert halls, theatres and opera houses. I would like each seat to be connected so that at the first cough/rustling paper/vibrating phone/phone ring/other noisy behaviour a mild electric shock would be delivered. This would get progressively stronger for further items of bad behaviour until the 3rd or 4th would also include automatic cancellation of future tickets. Checking a mobile phone or failing to switch it off when it does ring would go straight to the final stage. Sadly, this will never happen! But what you have said could happen. Everyone who books online or by phone can be identified. So perhaps we should report miscreants to the management and ask them to contact them and inform them that their behaviour was reported as being disturbing to other audience members and would they behave more considerately in future. If enough people were to do this, they might take some action.